Achievement

Trainee Matt Tierney is working with Adviser L. Subramaniam and Co-Advisor Helen Nissenbaum (also CO-PI) on the project "Safe-Deposit Box" that aims to build an efficient, secure and encrypted DropBox system that provides the same file manipulation primitives as a traditional DropBox while placing little trust on the cloud storage. The code for the system is available at: http://code.google.com/p/safe-deposit-box/

While taking the inter-disciplinary course "Values in Design" with Prof. Nissenbaum, Matt collaborated with a Ph.D. student in Media, Culture and Communication (Luke Stark) where they attempted a rather hard task, namely, identifying specific features of the system and specific values that they were interested thereby to promote. The project involved obvious privacy and security elements. It turned out an extremely useful avenue for broadening the research scope of Matt's project beyond just the technical issues that he had started with.